Sky-high solution to London's housing crisis
Thursday, 5 January 2012 10:52 AM
Architects have dreamed up a sky-high solution to London’s housing crisis: a 1,500 metre high tower with room for 100,000 people.
The supertower is the brainchild of Teatum + Teatum and Popularchitecture.com who describe it "not as a building so much as a vertical extrusion of the city".
Estimates suggest London needs to provide housing for almost 100,000 new people every year until 2016 to cope with new arrivals and replace existing housing stock at the end of its life.
The architects say the current preferred solution is to build low density commuter towns outside the city that would take up greenbelt and agricultural land.
But they argue London's population density is five times less than Paris, half that of New York and only just greater than Los Angeles.
So, they ask, why not house 100,000 people in a single structure? A new town in the sky complete with parks, public squares, schools and hospitals.
The supertower would be as high as the average level of cloud cover and be broken down into neighbourhoods of a single floor with 600 people, villages of 20 floors for 6,000 and three super-districts of 33,000 people each.
Large circular openings would provide communal spaces, parks and gardens for the residents linked by a continuous spiral running round the edge of the tower.
The tower would have five circulation cores with mass vertical transportation units, massive elevators like a tube train. All water and household waste would be recycled with fresh water coming from the ground or being harvested from the clouds on overcast days.
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